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UN Finds Grounds to Believe US Committed War Crimes in Iran

3 hours ago

A UN fact-finding mission says US strikes on a school in Minab and a sports hall in Lamerd killed at least 177 civilians in February.

United Nations human rights investigators have concluded there are reasonable grounds to believe the United States carried out war crimes in two February attacks in Iran that left at least 177 civilians dead. The findings, released Thursday by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, centre on missile strikes that hit a primary school in the town of Minab and a sports complex in Lamerd.

The mission's three independent experts told the UN Human Rights Council that both attacks amounted to indiscriminate strikes that killed civilians and wrecked civilian buildings. Washington has previously denied hitting Lamerd and said it was still looking into what happened at Minab. A State Department official said the United States placed no credibility in the report's conclusions.

Both strikes took place on 28 February, the day the mission says the United States and Israel opened their war against Iran. Tomahawk missiles slammed into Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in the southern town of Minab, killing at least 156 people, among them 120 children, according to local officials. Hours of the same day, Precision Strike Missiles scattered clouds of tungsten pellets across a sports complex and nearby homes in Lamerd, leaving at least 21 civilians dead, seven of them children.

Why the experts point to the US

The school sat next to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval facility that was also struck that day. But the investigators said the school building was easy to distinguish and that they found nothing to suggest it served any military function. They drew on media accounts describing a preliminary US military inquiry that reportedly attributed responsibility to American forces, and noted that the United States is the only participant in the conflict armed with Tomahawk missiles.

Those two threads led the experts to their central judgement: that American forces most likely launched the missiles that destroyed the classroom block. They went further, ruling that the school itself was the deliberate aim point rather than a stray hit or accidental damage from the assault on the neighbouring IRGC compound. Survivors, they said, reported that the building was hit a second time.

The US military has not yet published the outcome of its own examination of the Minab attack. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has stated that American forces would "never target civilian targets."

Iran accused of crimes against humanity

The report did not confine its criticism to the United States. The same experts determined that Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity while suppressing mass anti-government demonstrations in January. Security forces, they said, carried out killings on "a staggering and unprecedented scale," reaching into every one of the country's 31 provinces.

Tehran has not responded to the latest conclusions. In the past it has dismissed claims that it commits systematic human rights abuses.

The mission framed its work around the plight of ordinary Iranians squeezed on two sides. "Civilians in Iran are caught between gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity committed by their own government and the nation's deadly conflict with the United States and Israel," the panel said in its Thursday statement.

For this submission to the Human Rights Council, the experts chose to examine two of the bloodiest episodes of the war against Iran's civilian population. The scale of the loss at Minab - more than a hundred children killed in a single school - has made it one of the defining images of the conflict. The Lamerd strike, delivered by a different class of weapon designed to spread lethal fragments over a wide area, struck a residential district alongside the sports venue.

The report leaves several questions unresolved, chief among them the still-unreleased results of the American investigation into the Minab deaths. Until those findings appear, the fact-finding mission's account stands as the most detailed public reckoning of who was responsible and what was hit. Its authors have laid out a case that the school was chosen, not caught by accident - a conclusion the United States rejects but has yet to counter with evidence of its own.

US Iran strikes, war crimes Iran, Minab school strike, Lamerd sports complex, UN Fact-Finding Mission Iran, Tomahawk missiles Iran, Iran civilian casualties, UN Human Rights Council

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